“Inbound” and “lead generating” may not be two phrases that you often think of together. Well, it may be time you did. Inbound marketing is a long game, that’s true. However, that doesn’t mean it can’t also work for you in the near term as well, like bringing in quality leads. There are, in fact, many ways inbound marketing tactics can help increase lead generation, for today’s article we’re going to focus in on three primary aspects of your inbound strategy that have a particular impact on lead generation: content, social media presence, and website optimization/SEO.
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The idea of a content marketing funnel is to create content that resonates with your target market at every stage of their buyer’s journey. Those stages, in case you're new to this topic, are Awareness, Evaluation/Consideration, Conversion/Purchase, and Delight/Retention.
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How do you grab your audience's attention and maintain interest in your brand? By employing brand storytelling, of course! But what exactly is brand storytelling and how should you go about telling your startup's story?
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Brand voice is something that we talk about in passing quite often. What we realized is that the one thing we haven’t covered is how you can establish one for your company. Or for that matter, what exactly a brand voice is in the first place.
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The marketing tool known as the "funnel" has evolved into the "content marketing funnel" with the unprecedented growth of this new segment of the marketing world. This new version enables content marketers to better support sales by targeting each stage of the funnel with specific content that helps to qualify, nurture, and convert leads into customers. The strategic use of content can open up a lot of doors for marketers and startups.
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There is nothing inherently wrong with marketing emails. The problem is that most companies don’t do them right. Admit it, you've unsubscribed from marketing emails, marked them as spam, and/or had regrets for having opted-in to the email list.
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The concept of using giveaways as part of marketing campaigns has been around forever, and now, in our age of social media, promotions have been touted as the next silver bullet for marketing. What follows is a general discussion about giveaway planning and usefulness.
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Content marketing is a relatively new school of thought in the marketing world, albeit one that’s making waves. The idea appears simple—create engaging, informative content that delights your audience and when they’re ready, they’ll convert to customers. Sounds great, right? But how do you know if it’s working?
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Are you launching a startup and looking to start a blog at the same time? This post is for you. Your startup's blog can be contained within the company website, or it can be hosted somewhere else. Maybe you want to keep the blog more personal to you, the CEO, and link it to the company website as you decide what you want it to be.
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Marketing is the lifeblood of a startup, but there's not a well-delineated "how-to" path. In fact, if you're trying to get your startup off the ground, marketing may seem intimidating at best and impossible at worst. Marketing mistakes happen. There. We said it. They happen to everyone, and they are often unavoidable, especially in your startup's earliest stages. What can you do about it?
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Startup marketing. Words that strike fear in many a new CEO. After all, you’ve invested all of your time, energy, and money into getting the product ready for launch, building your core team, and little things like finding office space. You’ve got nothing left to sink into marketing that shiny new widget you’ve developed. Take it from us, don’t forgo the marketing, if you don’t sell any widgets, what was all that other work for?
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In the few short years since it burst on the scene, social media has become an integral part of life in the 21st-century. If you want your startup to truly thrive, it’s pretty much imperative to have a presence in this realm, but that opens up a whole line of questioning based on the single underlying question—Why? Further questions like “what channel should we be on?” and “how active do we need to be?” follow shortly after.
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Startups have a lot going on. Everyone is multitasking, everyone is wearing multiple hats, and everyone is likely working more hours than they’ll admit to their families. Is marketing one of the arenas causing your startup team’s headaches?
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Remember last week, when you checked up on your site analytics and noticed a visit from a “referring site?” Upon further investigation, you determined that someone had mentioned your startup in an article about emerging technology and had included a link to one of your landing pages. Cool, huh?
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You understand the importance of SEO in reaching and converting new customers, but you really can't come up with any money to hire an agency to design your startup's SEO strategy and do the work required to get it all going. What can you do?
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Social media is, at heart, a relationship-building tool. But it can also be used to promote content. It's all about finding the balance between self-promotion, sharing useful information, and entertaining your readers.
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Being well-liked. It's something we all desire. And we can all think of people in our spheres whom everyone feels comfortable around and whom everyone wants to know better. These people are like magnets. How do they do it? When we break it down, it's because they've worked on and gotten really good at many, if not all of, the following 15 habits.
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Any rumors you may have heard about the death of SEO have been vastly overstated. What is true, however, is that the focus has shifted from provider to audience. That means instead of producing product pages, sales one-sheets, and other company-centric content, you need to pivot and create great content that's focused squarely on your target personas.
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Your startup may literally be the best new thing since sliced bread, but if you can't market it, the world will not even be able to find the path to your door.
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Humans love stories. We also happen to love data. And what do you get when you mix data with storytelling? For our purposes, a case study.
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Content and data? Yep, content and data. Despite how these may seem—at first—to be at odds, data-driven research is a great way to further customize your content to your audience and drive your SEO straight through the roof. There are already a lot of articles out there on data-driven content. Many purport to give you “5 pieces of data you need to know…” before starting a content marketing campaign. While we absolutely support doing pre-campaign research, there is also a strong possibility of you falling into a data rabbit hole and being unable to extricate yourself.
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